CHAPTER SEVENTEEN REWRITE? PIECE OF CAKE. FIVE TO GO.

Don't understand what goes on in an aging writer's body. Friday, I rewrote entire seventeenth chapter of Angie's Choice in a couple of hours at Black Rock Coffee. Suddenly, I've rewritten three chapters in two weeks. I'm ahead of schedule again. Five chapters to go. Later took a brisk springy-stepped hour and fifteen minute walk on the tree-lined back streets of East Vancouver. I'd been so rundown, I felt reborn from a month long battle with psychic death. Hard to believe a summer cold can precipitate such a steep decline in energy and imagination. 

In Chapter Seventeen, I rediscovered the significant value of Angie's Choice. I'd forgotten the story's dynamic center, and the chapter brought it back to me. Makes me happy to have written the book. Not only that, I saw how I might improve the first chapter to make writing samples more appealing to agents and editors. Hope the novel can be made available to everyone...if (you know the big if, if you've been following this blog) IF someone other than myself will publish it. I know. There's always Amazon, but that's a last resort for the time being.

writer on the protest line

Still reading the Vonnegut bio and toying with Asimov's Second Foundation. Vonnegut was one of the first writer's to understand the loss of the story reading public to TV. He foresaw the end of consumer magazines that would publish fiction...like Collier's that published as many as five stories an issue. Just before his novels burst on the scene, he tried to write television dramas. Daunting to think how much writing is being supported solely by the college world. Judging by the pressure to downsize university departments that aren't immediately job related, even that resource will soon dwindle. Nowadays, everyone knows, instead of being paid for their work, writers pay contest fees to get their work looked at. What a freaking fictional world!